About 203 city employees will be receiving the six-month notice in the City Council effort to correct the budget.

City officials have crunched the numbers and determined that more than 200 Costa Mesa employees — or 43% of Costa Mesa's municipal workforce — could be laid off through outsourcing.

Of the 472 full-time positions, 203 city employees, give or take one or two, will get pink slips notifying them that they could be laid off in six months, said Administrative Services Director Steve Mandoki.

Tuesday's move is part of a dramatic restructuring of a city that faces potentially skyrocketing pension costs in the coming years.

Costa Mesa's own projections show that in the next few years, it will be expected to pay more into the state's public pension fund, CalPERS. It's a situation being replayed up and down the state: When the CalPERS pension fund was flush in the early 2000s, Costa Mesa did not have to pay much to the state to cover its employees' retirement costs. Now that CalPERS investments are hurting, cities have to cover the difference.

That pattern looks to continue for at least the next five years, city officials project.

Laying off hundreds of employees and their accumulating pensions by the fall would help to balance the city's budget in years to come, council members reason.

"We're going to run out of money sometime this year if nothing changes," said Councilman Eric Bever.

Costa Mesa Half-Way There

The best way to deal with public employees and their overly generous pension contracts is to not have public employees at all.

I commend Costa Mesa for a huge but incomplete step in the right direction.

Other than a small number of elected officials and a few administrative assistants, the correct number of public employees is zero.